We bought a bed today. Actually we bought it about a week ago and it was just delivered, with emphasis on those last two words that I’ll explain below. Since we needed an address in France to apply for a visa to live here, the easiest option was to rent for a year a fully furnished “holiday home” that would normally be used by people on vacation for a week or two and then handed back to the owners to prepare for the next round of guests. In our case, the landlords need only to check their bank account monthly to see that the rent’s been paid and in exchange we get a comfortable home where everything has already been provided. Now that we’ve bought our own house, that came with just the walls and roof, it’s time to fill it up. Continue reading “Bed in a box”

Every day we walk between the rental house that we’re living in for this first year that we’re in France and the home that we bought recently. We don’t have plans for extensive renovations but we’ve been doing lots of cleaning, patching, and painting. This has generated all sorts of trash that we’ve dutifully sorted between our recycle bin and the rubbish bin. Yesterday when we turned the corner on to our new street we both immediately noticed that our recycle bin was sitting in front of our neighbor’s window and there was a bright red tag attached to the handle. Considering that we’re currently a guest in the country, we’ve tried really hard to follow all the rules, written and rumored, subtle and in-your-face obvious, so our stomachs churned at what was obviously some kind of infraction. Continue reading “The red tag (not so) special”